Darkest hours – Young driver curfews

Should inexperienced drivers be banned from our roads when they are at greatest risk on Friday and Saturday nights?

30 November 2003Peter McKay

It is hard to find a young motorist who thinks it a great idea to ban provisional licence holders from driving on Friday and Saturday nights ? when inexperience and bravado often come together in a lethal cocktail.

They've just got the keys to transport and independence, and they certainly do not want limits on time spent at the wheel.

They tend not to see freedom has a perilous side; thanks to our pathetic licensing standards, they are effectively doing on-the-job training as they drive.

Road safety researchers ? and many parents ? have been calling for years for legislation to keep young drivers from our roads on Friday and Saturday nights, which are bad nights for crashes involving under-25s.

Those aged 17 to 25 account for about 30 percent of fatalities on NSW roads.

Controversial NRMA president Ross Turnbull recently revisited the issue, suggesting late-night curfews on teenage drivers had been successful elsewhere and should be tried here.

New Zealand has a curfew on young drivers in the hours they are most vulnerable and about a dozen US states have similar restrictions. Parents in Australia are in two minds about a potential curfew.

Louise Stirling, a Sydney North Shore mother of 17-year old P-plater twins, James and Christopher, prefers to have them drive their own Ford Laser (chosen because of its life-saving airbags and anti-lock brakes) rather than gambling on patchy public transport or taxis.

Stirling, whose teens have a strict "home-by midnight" curfew on weekends, believes young people buy cars as soon as they can because cars are safer and far more reliable than public transport, and taxis are neither cheap nor plentiful. In many parts of Sydney, public transport is non-existent after midnight.

The boys know they cannot drink and then drive and they are about to participate in a defensive driving course through AAMI to improve their competency.

"We have tried to prepare them properly and instil the right values, good attitude and responsibility," Stirling says.

"There are too many young people on the roads at night because parents continue with their social activities rather than take responsibility for collecting them from parties."

Stirling says that if the curfew was shown to reduce teenage deaths here, she would support it.

"I have not spent 17 years raising two young men only to have them taken from me in an unnecessary road crash."

But critics say a curfew would give kids a further reason to drink (because they're not driving), and that such an approach does not encourage responsibility. A curfew could discriminate against young shift workers, and more teenagers would be roaming the streets looking for taxis. A further consideration is the fairness or otherwise of placing restrictions on teenagers who may not have done anything wrong.

Nineteen-year-old student Ben Nightingale, of St Andrews, is in the second year of his green P-plates. He finds the idea of imposing late-night curfews on provision drivers both frustrating and insulting.

"The idea of a curfew reinforces a stereotype, that all young drivers are hoons who do not deserve the same rights as every other driver on the road," he says. Restricting night driving privileges for new drivers is merely a "Band-aid" solution to a growing problem.

Nightingale concedes he and his peers are inexperienced but insists they should not be punished for the system's inadequacies. His view is that the antiquated licensing system is the root of the problem.

"To get my licence I needed to perform a reverse park, a three-point turn and a hill start," he says, "and this was the extent of the testing of my driving skill. What about testing how we control the car on wet roads? Or how we react in an emergency braking situation?"

Nightingale says claims by politicians that advanced driving courses create a "hoon culture" are rubbish. If all learners had to complete one of these courses, in the same way as a motorcycle learner must, then lives would be saved, and suggestions of a driving curfew for young drivers would be bankrupt.

After the idea of a curfew was floated on this page, New Zealand-born John Ready of Potts Point condemned overseas curfew systems.

US research shows that 68 percent of teenage accidents occur before 9pm and that distractions from other passengers are the cause of most accidents, said Ready, a licence-holder for 31 years (from the age of 15 in NZ).

"[In New Zealand] young fatalities have decreased progressively since 1976 when defensive driving began to be pushed," he says. "Driver education will improve our road death statistics more than the typical political reaction of throwing a penalty at the problem or outlawing an activity."

Not surprisingly, however, young drivers think the law is unjust, unnecessary, impractical and impossible to enforce.

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